Saturday, November 24, 2007

I recently got the Wii Sports for the Nintendo Wii. I never thought the experience will be this good, it an amazing game.

Wii Sports offers five distinct sports experiences, each using the Wii Remote controller to provide a natural, intuitive and realistic feel. To play a Wii Sports game, all you need to do is pick up a controller and get ready for the pitch, serve or that right hook.

There is a collection of sports games includes golf, boxing, tennis, baseball and bowling. Best part is its physical activity. I enjoy tennis and boxing the most. I think its kinda exercise as well :) and its a fun game to play with the family, my youngest sister is my biggest competition.

The little guys on the screen don't even have arms. But it's hilarious, and it shows off the power of the motion-sensitive Wii controller to put you right in the game, sweating and yelling and trying crazy spins and lunges and angles.

One thing I realized was for console games graphics is not the key, its the playability and the gamer experience that counts. At least that applies for me. Its no surprise that Wii Sports has won a lot of attention and has been considered one of the best games of the year.

Maybe I like Wii better cos I am not really good with pressing buttons as fast as you could to win a game. Wii really provides the gamer a totally different user experience.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

We all take it for granted that we are all connected. We don't care how, but when things go wrong we really get frustrated. Example if our internet gets slow, the voice quality drops, etc. I guess the magic word here is interconnectivity. Till now we have different ways for different services for interconnectivity. Example your internet goes through something else, your voice on different channels and maybe stuff like MMS/GPRS (GRX interconnect which lets you interchange MMS and enable GPRS roaming, maybe even IM) on others. So its really not really the ideal way if you look at the whole things. On top of all this some connectivities are just exclusive to Mobile Network Operators, etc thus restricting openness into these networks.

If we look at the whole thing and apply the case to todays world, its obvious IP is the solution. Why not over conventional IP via the internet? Well I guess the problem here is quality of service. Initially the internet was not designed to be commercial; it was just designed to be used by US defense department and a few universities. This resulted in not so ideal design. Some might disagree with me on this, but thats the reality. Some times the quality of the internet we experience is really not what we are promised by the ISP's and what we pay for. This has been kinda accepted by almost everyone, without complains.

IP based services on the mobiles is the future. No question about it. It can deliver voice, images , rich content to innovative messaging solutions. To enable all this while ensuring quality of service and which is commercially feasible and manageable IP Interconnectivity the the proposed solution. IPI is the new proposed solution by worlds GSM association. This is presently at a development and a trial level. A few carriers and operators are active in making this a reality. Few trial runs have already been conducted since OCT 2007. Mostly its just voice which is being currently being trailed on and from what I was presented today, its really promising. The IPI will carry everything and anything. The beauty of it is IPI will ensure that the needed quality of service is maintained between each IPX, meaning it will enable end to end QoS for all IP Services enabling consistent and predictable service delivery between end customers. IPI is designed to maintain different levels of QoS for different services. Example services like SMS, emails, etc can be at a different QoS level and other more demanding services like Voice, Video and other content can be maintained at other higher levels. This promised the end customers the expected quality of service ensuring a rich user experience.

On top of the user experience, there are other many advantages to the operators. Such as a more secure network, a sustainable commercial model, universal interoperability (not just limiting the network to MNO's, but even ISP's and ASP's can connect in) and other advantages like being highly efficient and scalable. Its just at the infant stage as of today but what I can tell you is this is the future, this is what will enable us to go for the real "eat all you can" model. And yeah it was also interesting for me to find out that on IPI I guess voice is delivered via SIP-I (after all its IP based anyway). So again, its almost clear that IPI will replace GRX, or rather its gonna enhance the current GRX over IPI. The other biggest advantage I see is that if I am not mistaken, it makes things so simpler for interconnectivity where once you are connected to one IPX you are connected to the all the rest of the operators who are connected to that IPX.

Even though I am not into switching, its kinda interesting to follow up on this which gives you a better idea on where the industry is heading and forecast somethings.

Friday, November 09, 2007

A few months back my son asked me if I can buy him membership for a game portal called club penguin, I was kinda shocked cos; he was just 7 and here here is asking me to purchase an online membership. I mean when we were seven what were we doing? Anyway after about 3 months; I find him and my youngest sister and their cousin gang really into this game.

What I knew or kinda figured out that it was flash based and little penguin's are in the game. Its like a small virtual world; where they can have their own pets; own igloo and even earn money by playing games (score points) and buy stuff for the igloo and bla bla. Was a cool thing for the kids. To my surprise I find that this company now has even been bought over by Disney for $700 Million. Amazing. Seems they have have 700,000 paid subscribers (I paid $29.95 for six months for my son as well, and I am sure I'd have to renew that too).

Sunday, November 04, 2007

Ok, here is a controversial story of Adam and Eve. I am not interested in the religious aspect of it at this moment. What I would like to point out is that, we are talking of heaven here; I mean if we refer to the time before they ate that apple. So there was it; "Heaven", what more can I tell you. Everything you needed was there; or at least it should be.... but Eve; she had to greed for this "apple" (or the forbidden fruit). I don't understand it. Just this apple. Again we are talking about heaven and the human population of just 2; meaning they had the whole place for themselves as well. :) However Eve was not happy, she somehow had to convince Adam to bring her this fruit and eat it. Thats it. The rest is up to you to conclude and apply.

Now don't plan to kill me, I am just thinking out loud. One thing, which comes to my mind is they were in heaven and yet they did break rules or they wanted more? So for all the people who work so hard to go to paradise, I hope the same won't happen to them. ooops. After all, still we are talking about humans here.

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Simple thingy but thought I'd make a post on it. Firstly this assumes you have a facebook account and have a blog .

A badge is a customizable clip of your Facebook profile that you can share on other web sites like blogs, personal web pages, or forums. You can choose what information to show on your badge. The badge will be automatically updated and visible to anyone you want, even non-Facebook users.

So moving on; easiest way is log in to your facebook account and go to your profile scroll down and just click on the "Create a Profile Badge". On this page, select the "Create Badge" option or just visit http://www.facebook.com/editbadge.php. Next Create a VERTICAL, JAVASCRIPT format badge and click SAVE.

Once you get to the next page copy the outputted HTML code and go to your blogger template. Just append the code into your template. Thats all.